Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

I enjoyed this late Neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Seta. (What a name for an Italian filmmaker to be cursed with!) It deals with the attempts of a Sardinian shepherd to evade the law after he’s wrongly accused of stealing some pigs. Hiding out in the countryside, he’s forced to balance his desire to save his skin with his duties towards his flock and his younger brother; both parties follow him across the landscape, forever complicating the elaborate game of hide and seek he’s playing with the police. It’s no exaggeration to say that the movie does for sheep what “The Bicycle Thief” did for bikes, meaning that it uses them to demonstrate just how transitory economic well-being can be. As the shepherd’s prospects grow worse, the landscape grows more forbidding, yet it retains a ferocious, unsentimentalized beauty. At times the images seem lit from within, as in a Baroque treatment of the flight into Egypt (there are many night scenes). In its rugged visual poetry and its cool but empathic portrayal of a hardscrabble people, it bears comparison with the best works of Robert Flaherty, “Man of Aran” in particular, as well as to the Taviani brothers’ “Padre Padrone.”